Text: Acts 9: 1-22
The official title of today's feast is the Conversion of St. Paul, but today's feast is more about our own conversion as a people of God challenged by God to a more expansive love and acceptance of others. Paul's conversion is famous enough and we marvel at it even if our own experience of God is not like Paul's. Our conversion and experience of God is more like that of Ananias in this story.
God comes to Ananias and instructs him to admit Paul into the company of the believing community Ananias protests: Lord, this man has persecuted us and seeks to destroy us - how can we accept him into our community, how can we accept his change of life? But God insists that Paul be admitted, and Ananias does as God instructs him, much to the enrichment of the early Christian community?
How many times have we perhaps quashed the faith of a potential Paul in our communities? How many times have we rejected or actively sought to remove others from the Christian assembly because we think them unworthy and cannot accept that God can have a relationship with that person? How much do we know the intricacies of church law, but so little of what lies in the depths of the human heart! Today's feast is a call to our own conversion as individuals and communities on our capacity to love and accept others as Ananias did for Paul.
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